Page:Letters from England.djvu/113

 sheriff, shrew and Castle Finlarig; I think it represents something very ancient, perhaps the torments of the damned in hell. Anyhow, I made a careful drawing of it.

I succeeded in drawing a Scottish couple, a man with his wife. For the most part the Scots are sturdy, with florid faces and powerful necks; they have many children and attractive, ancient clan-names. The skirts of kilts are worn only in the army or when they are playing the bag-pipes. The checkwork plaids are called tartans, and are really a kind of escutcheon; each clan has a tartan of different colours, and this assuredly was once an adequate reason why mutual massacres took place between clans whose checkwork patterns varied.